When I Think of Home

going and staying, rooting and uprooting

I grew up in a midwestern town tucked under the corner of Indiana’s northern border, just outside Chicago. If you drive across the U.S. on Interstate 80, passing through states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, or Iowa and Nebraska, somewhere along that long and harrowing section of endless construction, you’ll find the exit for my home under billboards that sell everything from hair loss solutions to strip clubs.

It’s an unassuming town, as you may have guessed, with streets of small cookie cutter homes built to support the steel mill boom of the 1950’s. I worked in the custard shop on the main street when I was 14. I rode my bike to the library, and knew the details of every porch on my paper route.

When I went away to college, I couldn’t wait to shake the dust of that town off my feet. I didn’t care where I went or what I did, I just wanted to go far away. Some of that had to do with the depressing nature of the area— its flat landscape choked by the steel mills to the north and the corn fields to the south. It didn’t seem like people did much with their lives beyond bars and bowling, at least as far as I could see.

At that time, I didn’t much care for the people in our lives, or rather, the people that were no longer in our lives. The church I had grown up in and had been a part of had fallen apart, and for various reasons most of my childhood friends and their families no longer spoke to us. I had been a nondescript in high school, concerned mostly with my journalism endeavors and a mediocre career as an athlete. The friends I had in school were peripheral. Leaving was easy, and desirable.

Of course I couldn’t see everything. What mattered to me was the things that were happening to and around me. So any good that was taking place, any investment in the lives or people of that place, did not register or make much of an impression. All I knew or cared about was the life I was experiencing and the one I could envision.

That vision took me far away. I moved to the mountains of Wyoming, attended a small wilderness Bible college where we trekked and camped and learned theology together. I met people who restored my vision of the Good Life, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I just knew we lived life together without strife or competition, and we drank deeply of rivers and mountains and forests under star filled skies. After two years, I didn’t want to leave, but something told me I couldn’t stay. It was as if the plate I was feasting on was expiring and to continue there would be to eat out of an old can whose goods were no longer viable.

I left, but barely.

When I moved to Philadelphia to attend University, I lied about where I was from. In the yearbook from that first year, my place of residence is listed as Jackson, Wyoming, instead of Indiana. It’s embarrassing to think of now, though the lie was small and mostly inconsequential. I remember one of my college friends being confused when he later realized I had actually grown up in the midwest, not the mountains.

The truth was I had no love for my hometown, aside from my parents who still lived there (and did not bowl, or go to bars I should add). It held a lot of sadness, a lot of hurt, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

After college, I got married and lived in the Philadelphia area for four wonderful years. We had our first babies, and rented our first home— an apartment right down the hall from several other young couples and single friends. Those first years felt like living in a commune, without all the weirdness. We just had meals at random, watched each others babies, hung out after work, and shared our hearts. The Good Life put on more flesh there; I experienced the small wonders of everyday life with your neighbors, the first hints of working through hard things together, the beauty of building into the souls of people around you.

Then we left for China.

We have lived in this country for fifteen years, a number I never thought I would see. I don’t know how many more we have, though it’s something we think about more than we used to. We are not ready to go, but the ongoing restrictions are making life so difficult that foreigners are leaving the country in droves.

I get it.

I once left a place that felt like it was suffocating the life out of me.

Place and home hold a funny space in my heart now. I used to read a lot of Wendell Berry, wanting to imbibe his deep commitment to the land and to cultivating it over time. Reading him helped me through those first years in China, thinking of roots and longevity and staying the course.

But over time, his message felt less doable, and harder to understand in a cross-cultural setting. What if the country around you is constantly being torn apart and reshaped by an infrastructure you have no say in? What if half the people you are committed to leave every June? What if the visa in your passport has a limit to the years you can commit to a place?

I remember an email a woman sent to me right before we moved to China. She was living there already, and was giving me some welcome tips on what to bring and what to expect, etc. At the end, she said that living overseas had brought a new tension into her life.

“When you are here, you will long to be there; when you are there (your home country) you will long to be here. Ultimately, it reminds you that you are always longing for your eternal home.”

And I wonder, if more than anything in my life, this has always been true.

Over the past week, we have said goodbye once again to friends leaving for good. It’s always a melancholy start to the summer, adjusting to the community when it is quiet and void of the people that we did life with. There is always a both/and feeling that I go through of sending them off with so much appreciation and blessing, and feeling a little abandoned.

Looking back over my years of finding “home” here, and then there, and then here, has helped me. I know that there is good in being rooted in one place, and that God in his grace uses that. I see it in my parents and the way they have loved and lived into the place I grew up in spite of my leaving. I also see that the wandering for some is necessary, and that God allows us to root into places for awhile, and then to go.

St. Augustine famously wrote, God has made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in him. At times, I think he must have been speaking directly to me. That sense of being home, he tells me, is waiting for you someday. It whispers to you from another land. But sometimes it may find you here, even now, wherever you may land, wherever He is with you.